blogging 102

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes If you read my blog, it is most likely you are either a) a friend who is trying to get inside my head, or b) want to make money from blogging. I am going with the latter. You, like me, may be frustrated with Google for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into, but I am here to say there are alternatives. I am partial to BidVertiser myself, but I am looking into a number of affilate programs right now to replace Google on The Hart Blog Network blogs. The latest new affilate I have found is ScribeFire which I also see Darren Rowse has up on his website, Pro Blogger. John Cow wrote up about the soon to be gone Adsense Refferals. Instead of their Adsense Referral program they are now going to use the Google Affiliate Network. What this is going to allow is now publishers are going to apply for an advertiser program and then get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of the usual clicks or impressions. Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger has an... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either. The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done. I checked back a week later and nothing since that... 

Reading time: < 1 minute 5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart. The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio. 4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes The question of whether you should make theme adjustments is always a difficult one to answer. It is even be harder to do and not negatively affect your onsite readers. That being said here are my thoughts. Limit major theme changes to no more than once a month. Anymore than once a month clearly defines you as a noob. A complete theme change is sometimes necessary especially as you are learning, but should be done with caution. When building or choosing a new theme make sure that it is easily tweaked later on. Having a CSS class that will allow the quick insertion of more banners or advertising will save you countless hours of work down the road. • Work out all changes before hand on a test blog with actual posts and pages. I prefer to run a local server using Apache, mySql, and php management on my windows PC Make changes when the fewest people are reading your blog and with a very clear head. A pot of coffee by your side while making... 

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes Here is your daily round up of everything you should have read today, but didn’t because you were jerking all morning, napped this afternoon, farted around with your new theme project this evening, watched idol, blogged about idol, wondered where all this traffic came from on The Other Blog, fooled around some more with your theme and then wondered what you were going to post today over in Blog Boy. i suppose I could have twitted all that today. Mani at The Daily SEO Blog brought us Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability Darren blogged on branding your blog with your name in The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog Last but not least Sara gives us a very appropriate post on tax day in Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance convey_source = "English"; Read More →